The handgun shooting public - a sizeable portion of them anyway - romanticizes shooters of the past but conversely thinks the only gun worth shooting is a huge "thumpenblitzenboomer" (to borrow Mr. DuToit's term). The two concepts don't coexist; police, the military and civilians considered sidearms like these to be perfectly adequate.

McThag, the story I read had it that a .32 revolver was considered to be a perfectly adequate police weapon until the first cocaine scare, when the newspapers started agitating about Negroes with cocaine in them going after the white women. (which still happens a lot, even without the cocaine. Look at the numbers)